Osage orange tree

Too bad those Native American recipes are merely a rumor.

Larger and knobbier than a grapefruit, the fruit of Maclura pomifera — also known as the hedge apple, horse apple, green brain, and monkey ball — turns yellowish-green when it ripens in the autumn. It also develops an aroma faintly like an orange (hence the name), but it certainly doesn't taste like one. "Some authors have claimed that Native Americans had a recipe that made osage oranges palatable," wrote Nicholas P. Money in his book Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard, "but nothing touches them now. Even raccoons, opossums, and skunks who show no hesitation in consuming the rotting contents of a trash can shun the osage orange."

Curious, since as a category, fruits evolved by offering animals an equitable arrangement: Plants would offer animals something to eat, and animals would carry the plant's seeds in their digestive tracts before depositing them elsewhere, helping to spread and perpetuate the botanical species. Today, squirrels reportedly tear apart the osage orange fruit to eat the seeds, but that would defeat the plant's "purpose"; humans propagate the tree for use as a dense, thorny hedge and as a windbreak, but they have little use for the fruit. (Its folk reputation as an insect repellent is scoffed at in most scientific circles.) Why, then, does the osage orange fruit exist at all?

Connie Barlow offered a hypothesis in her 2000 article "Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them," and later in her book The Ghosts of Evolution. Barlow proposed that mammoths, mastodons, and other large herbivores were the osage orange's original partners in seed dispersal; she also cites research suggesting that this was true for other now-domesticated fruits including the pawpaw, persimmon, and avocado. Those partnerships ended some 13,000 years ago when the megafauna were driven to extinction — by humans, as you guessed.

Barlow also noted that a better name for the osage orange, reflecting its true botanical kin, might have been osage breadfruit. I've enjoyed roasted breadfruit at the West Indian Day Parade, but don't go roasting osage oranges yourself unless one of us can confirm they won't make you sick (who knows how, or even if, Native Americans prepared them). A safer use would be to sit an osage orange in a bowl in your pantry, to keep away the weevils. No weevils in your pantry? Great — it must be working!

Osage orange tree
Marcus Garvey Park

Comments

[Kristen]

One osage orange per room also (allegedly) drives cockroaches away in droves. http://ow.ly/iHCs

[Thomas Price]

Horses seem to like the osage orange. When I rode quite a bit as a child, my pony would always stop at the osage orange tree to nibble at the fruit. That is why they are also called "horse apples". Cows will also eat the fallen apples. However, I have heard of horses and cattle both choking on them while trying to eat them whole.

[donna]

I am just looking into osage oranges, since i have a tree of my own and they are dropping everywhere, I will definitely bring a few in to get rid of spiders and so forth, thanks for the info

[Dave Cook]

Update: In autumn I found an abundance of fallen fruit and stowed some in my kitchen. Over the course of several weeks the oranges shriveled, the color faded to black, and the aroma disappeared, but my few roaches did not. I removed and discarded four oranges and wiped clean the spots where they had settled, but I have the nagging feeling that I'd started with five.

[Joyce Duke]

Looked out my back door a few years ago to find a horse eating horse apples off my trees. His two owners who had found him there said he loved them and would always run away to find them when they fell off trees. This is the only time I ever saw any creature eat them.

[bob raymond]

There is a recipe for BBQ Bodock Balls
in the book "Down Here Men Don't Cook".

[Dave Cook]

Speaking of:

www.Sharecipe.com/recipe/barbecued_bois_d'arc_(bodock)_balls

[Melanie]

I have been tempted by their beautiful aroma when they get ripe and did wonder if something extinct loved to eat them. I couldn't bring myself to taste one. I'm waiting until Andrew Zimmern eats one.

[Tanya]

Is that recipe a joke? It certainly sounds like it's from a man who doesn't cook...